WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE ITALY SICILY - news journal UPDATE - (en) Italy, Sicilie Libertaria #451: PIRATE ECOLOGY (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 The increasingly pressing climate crisis should reorient our choices and

actions. After decades of studies and complaints by scientists and
climate scholars, even the institutions recognize the need for
interventions, more or less urgent. However, this new institutional
sensitivity has translated more into announcements and the coining of
expressions good for the media, green new deal or ecological transition
to give two examples, than into very specific choices. On the other
hand, climate movements show an "inexplicable" weakness and
fragmentation if one thinks of the urgency and gravity of the issues.

To make an interesting contribution to the ongoing debate and to try to
clarify the direction of a movement against climate change, a small
booklet written by Fatima Ouassak, a French political scientist,
environmental activist, anti-racist and feminist, has been available for
a few months, published by Tamu editions, a young Neapolitan publishing
house that is pursuing a specific editorial project, with the suggestive
title: For a pirate ecology... And we will be free. This is a dense
pamphlet that allows us to penetrate the tangle of injustices that are
suffered daily by the subaltern classes and at the same time tries to
unravel some threads capable of freeing them from the grip in which the
system forces them. Therefore, no generic appeals for the protection of
the environment but a precise class position. From this point of view,
qualifying Fatima Ouassak as a feminist, anti-racist and ecologist
militant is not a pure attributive exercise but indicates the global
perspective from which today's complex reality must be viewed and the
precise positioning of those who want to implement an action of radical
transformation: the struggles for the climate must be intertwined with
the struggles against racism, against patriarchy, against every form of
oppression, from a class point of view.

The starting point of a broad and radical ecological movement, according
to Ouassak, is the recognition of the greatest freedom of movement for
all, for white Europeans of the wealthy or middle classes, as well as
for non-white Europeans of the working classes or for migrants crossing
the Mediterranean. Only the freedom to move - the possibility of leaving
the ghetto neighborhoods in which the exploited classes are confined and
controlled by a violent security system, the possibility for migrants to
reach Europe without legal constraints - can create the preconditions
for a struggle to take off that marks a substantial change. "We agree -
she writes - on the need to solve the climate problem, but from whose
point of view and in whose interest? Is it humanity that we want to save
or only the rich and fortunate white minority? What kind of ecology
guarantees all freedoms, including that of movement and settlement for
all, without distinction? What kind of ecology are we defending? An
ecology that adds borders to borders or an ecology that seeks to break
down walls".

It is colonial capitalism, as the author calls it, that "needs to
produce race and territory. To accumulate maximum profit it needs to
hierarchize individuals and lands, to produce respectable living beings
and despicable living beings"; being in a position to be able to escape,
through freedom of movement, from this mechanism represents a first step
towards a process of collective liberation. While mainstream ecology,
whether right or left, does not consider freedom important and ends up
siding with the "maintenance of the current social order". Symptomatic
of this conformist way of thinking is the idea that we need to be
increasingly informed, that information can give us the push to change
our way of living and contribute to changing the general fate of
humanity. But, Ouassak objects, in the meantime information is
unilateral, it emanates from the top down, from the presumed holders of
knowledge to the uneducated population to sensitize them in the right
choices and, above all, what use is knowledge if the popular classes do
not have the possibility to decide and change things because they are
oppressed, controlled and ghettoized to be exploited? It then becomes a
moralistic discourse to say that to change it is enough to only change
lifestyles and that this ultimately depends simply on our individual
choices.

Radical change certainly does not happen by chance, the author
immediately clarifies which main subject can promote it and what change
needs to be implemented. Pirate Ecology is part of a trilogy, which
began with La puissanse des mères, which identified the revolutionary
subject, mothers, continues with Pirate Ecology, which questions ecology
as a tool for liberation, and will have to conclude with a third volume,
which will analyze "the question of the organization of society".

"Although these books deal with different themes, the question we intend
to answer is the same: how can we make the world a more breathable place
for children? The ambition is twofold: participation in the awareness of
popular neighborhoods as a political subject and the definition of an
ecological project. The method is[...]to take a step aside to think and
design militant practice and reflection. This step aside is based on the
militant work of the past and aims to strengthen the militant work of
the future". The appeal to children is not a mere rhetorical expedient
or a humanitarian and moral appeal; throughout the book, children are
considered subjects capable of understanding and making requests, of
becoming promoters of the process of change. Also exemplified in the
liberating metaphors to which the author refers: pirates, dragons and
the sea.

In such an oppressive and repressive world as the one imposed by the
capitalist-colonial system, a true path of liberation from below,
suggests the author, can find concreteness "in mutiny and secession", in
escaping and creating spaces of freedom. To do this, it is necessary to
"change course[...]and go towards the South, the South of the
Mediterranean and the South present in Europe. The way out of ecocidal
capitalism will be neither civilized nor barbaric. It will be conquered
through a war of liberation, a revolution whose center will certainly be
the global South. It is from there that everything will start again. And
in Europe we will do our part".

All this is not stated in an abstract formula but practiced in the daily
life of a struggle that, although still embryonic, has found substance
in Vendragon, the first house of popular ecology, which Fatima Ouassak
helped to found in Bagnolet, a suburb of Paris.

A compact book, therefore, to be read in one breath and to be meditated
upon, the fruit of the author's militant passion and the awareness of
taking that "lateral" view, capable of making us look at the world from
other perspectives. In fact, it closes with a fable entitled A tale of
pirate ecology, in which children are the architects of change, with
their imagination and their resourcefulness.

Angelo Barberi

http://sicilialibertaria.it
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